Lareina Yee: If all of that is possible now, what will the finance function look like in five years? What things do you hope you’ll be able to do with gen AI?
Sarah Friar: I really hope we will move completely to the point of being the home for business insights, driving the business to go bigger and faster. Today, there’s still so much in the finance department that is the look back, not the look forward. I hope in five years we’ll look back at how we do things today and feel like today’s methods are so outdated. I want to be able to look at my team and see that everyone is in that mode of forward-thinking and insight-driven work, and that a lot of the work we do today becomes rote work that gen AI does for us.
Lareina Yee: You have held leadership roles at companies from Salesforce to Square to Nextdoor, and now you are leading finance at OpenAI, where using generative AI (gen AI) to automate activities like many of those within the finance function is a core conversation. What has that experience been like? How are you envisioning the finance team of the future?
Sarah Friar: It’s really fun to get to work on building a platform of the future, where you have a tool that can do increasingly complex tasks and empower people to work more efficiently and creatively.
Lareina Yee: So the title is not actually the objective. But there are certain sets of capabilities that you’ve acquired over time that allow you to be at the center of driving substantial change. Can you tell us a little bit about some of those capabilities that are timeless, irrespective of the shifts in technology, including the advent of AI?
Sarah Friar: First and foremost is knowing how to break down and solve problems, and how to communicate. Next is being strategic. A lot of people don’t really define strategy well. Their tactics become their strategy, as opposed to having a strategy that they put alongside tactics. I think these two skills have always helped me in whatever role I’m in to really help drive a business.
And then I’d say the skill of understanding where community meets kindness and humanity is important, so I’m not losing who I am to the circumstances of my work. I actually asked ChatGPT about this the other night, when someone I was with had me type in the prompt, “Based on what you know about me, ChatGPT, what’s the thing I might not know most about myself?” What an interesting prompt, right?
And the answer it came back with was about how much growing up in Northern Ireland still continues to shape the person I am today. I love that answer, because it reminded me that the culture of where I grew up really is important. For example, I see how my parents’ investment in their community comes back full circle now that they are the older generation and people in their community check on them. They feel really supported by it.
So I think about the community I’m building in my work in relation to that. Maybe it’s my community in my company or the community of my ecosystem. Or it’s how we at OpenAI show up in the world where we become synonymous with AI. How do we build a community where it’s a world of possibilities and opportunities, rather than something that can be more fear-driven?
